MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON AT the end of the year 1917, when it became evident that the Germans could -not possibly win the war, and were indeed likely to lose it, I called in to see my father and found him crouching over the fire in the company of the the French Ambassador, M. Paul Cambon. , They had been colleagues and cronies together for some forty years and after my father had retired from public service the old ambassador would often come to visit him. They would exchange memories of the past, hopes regarding the present, and the gloomiest prognostications as to the future of the world when once victory had been won and peace established. "It is not," the ambassador murmured in his precise and elegant intonation, "you and me, my dear friend, for whom I feel pity. We have lived our lives and will be unaffected by the horrors to come. It is to this young man," (and at this he placed a thin white hand upon my knee)—" to this young man that my sympathies go out abundantly. He will never know how agreeable life can be." I was aware, even at that date, that this most distinguished representative of the Third Republic was mistaken. Being one of Nature's bohemians, my interpretation of the douceur de vivre was, I well knew, wholly different from his. I wanted to motor about Europe in my ramshackle two-seater, to drink Chianti On the harbour front at Lerici, to bathe at Marathon by moonlight. I had no wish at all to sit through, long dinner-parties with one stiff woman on my right and another on my left : I wanted to meet my friends around a small table and in small houses, when conventions could be relaxed and conversation general. Heaven knows that, between the two wars, I achieved these desires and enjoyed on my own terms the douceur de vivre. * * * * Yet now that the second war has come and gone, now that social intercourse has been degraded to the strained promis- cuity of a sherry-party, I am conscious, when I look upon the young, that I also murmur to myself the saddening words : "Unhappy generation ! You will never know how agreeable life can be !" On rare occasions my pangs of sympathy have found a voice, and I have imparted to my younger friends my condolence with them at having thus been robbed of the opportunity of pleasure. My remarks, although deftly framed, have been received with merriment. To them it seems as absurd that I should deplore their lack of enjoyment as it seemed to me, those more than thirty years ago, when M. Cambon placed his hand upon my knee and sighed deeply at the thought that I should never see again the hard hot glitter of the Edwardian world. How sombre seem to. them the days when men and women were supposed to dress for dinner and wear hats upon their heads ! How stultifying, in comparison to their far flung freedom, appear the few conventions which survived The First World War ! How self- indulgent (to do them justice) seem the little comforts which in this age of austerity they so cheerfully renounce ! Yet I remain convinced that there are certain goods which the younger generation have unjustly been denied. They may never come to know the ease, the stimulus, or the gentle discipline of a house where guests of charm or distinction are carefully chosen, deliberately mingled and fastidiously entertained.
* * * * The famous hostesses of the past have either possesged great wealth and social eminence, or else they have been women of compelling intellectual and conversational brilliance. Lady Colefax; who was the animating centre and fly-wheel of an eclectic circle of British and foreign friends, had neither of these advantages. She was never a rich woman and her house in Westminster was lovely but small. Although highly intelligent and gifted with an astonishing memory for all that she had seen and read, she never sought to impose her own opinions or to compete with the epigrams and paradoxes of her guests. Yet she succeeded in creating and maintaining for more than thirty years (first in Onslow Square, and then at Old Buckhurst, Argyll House and Lord North Street) a group of interesting or distinguished friends, who, although selected from different areas and grades of achievement or promise, were united in their affection for her personality and respect for her character. The extent of her influence, the compelling position which she had acquired, can best be gauged by the feelings of actual bewilderment which her death has aroused ; the members of her circle, both at home and abroad, feel that they have suddenly been abandoned and dispersed ; they realise with distress that henceforward they will lose contact with each other, that the social centre, which for much of their adult lives they had taken for granted, has ceased abruptly to exist. It will survive only in the-memories of her friends and the memoirs of the age.
What were the capacities and talents which rendered Lady Colefax so beneficial a social power ? Her energy was for- midable. While London still slept round her, she would have written and addressed some sixty postcards and the telephone would start shrilling before the postman dared. Her tele phone messages were curt and mandatory. Her postcards, which had the appearance of Persian quatrains, were illegible ; one was obliged to treat them as abstract drawings, prop them up on the mantelpiece, and slowly take them in. But energy alone would not account for her influence. Her taste was incomparable. Even as in decoration and gardening she always chose the cooler 'tones, the simpler flowers, so also in her social selection she preferred the authentic to the flam- boyant, the natural to the imposing. She set no store what- soever upon purely social eminence and cared only that her guests should be interesting, interested and sincere. Her taste was manifest also in her abhorrence of the vulgar, in her quick enjoyment of any form of beauty, in her detestation of publicity, malice or intrigue. It would be untrue to describe her as an effortless hostess ; in fact the force which she gen- erated in organising her parties was hydro-electric ; but once her guests had arrived, the dynamos ceased to buzz and there ensued an atmosphere of unstrained repose. If sometimes she attempted to manage her friends, they accepted the dis- cipline gladly, knowing that she gave them in return her passionate, and sometimes combative, loyalty ; knowing also that in her they witnessed an example of selfless courage, which misfortune could 'never tarnish or illness dim. And beneath it all there was the consciousness of a woman of profound affections and deep feeling. Her devotion to her husband's memory, the affectionate relations between herself and her old servants, were, for all her essential reserve, indi- cations of the-intense, the lavish and the restless love she gave her friends.
The sequence of gifted men and women who enjoyed her friendship—Kipling, Barrie, Henry James, George Moore, Valery, Arthur Balfour, Virginia Woolf, Gosse, Garvin, Thomas Lamont—have already passed into history. Others among her oldest friends, such as Bernard Berenson and Max Beerbohm, remain to grieve her loss. And' the younger generation, to whom she showed such delighted kindness, and to whom she was the interpreter of a gentler and more hos- pitable past, will recall with gratitude the times when they also were admitted to that oval table, when they were privi- leged to meet the eminent on confidential terms, and when they acquired some conception at least of what is meant by the haunting phrase—la douceur de vivre.
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